Georgia Just Built a Pipeline From the Farm to the Food-Animal Vet Shortage

FOOD ANIMAL MEDICINE

Only about 3 in 100 practicing veterinarians in the U.S. work exclusively in food-animal medicine, and that number keeps shrinking. Two Georgia colleges just signed a five-year agreement betting that the fix starts with students who grew up on the farm.

By the Vet Candy Editorial Team

Rural Georgia has a veterinarian problem, and it is getting worse in a very specific, very measurable direction. Of the more than 90,000 veterinarians practicing clinically in the United States in 2025, only 3.1 percent worked solely in food-animal medicine, a share that has actually been shrinking year over year. For a state whose agriculture industry depends on cattle, poultry, and swine producers having access to skilled veterinary care, that decline is not an abstract statistic. It is a workforce crisis with a farm attached to it.

On September 2, Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and the University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine signed a Memorandum of Understanding at Tift Hall on the ABAC campus in Tifton, formally launching the Georgia Rural Practice Veterinary Incentive Program, or Georgia Rural Practice VIP. The five-year agreement builds a direct pathway from ABAC's undergraduate Animal Science track straight into UGA's veterinary school, aimed squarely at students who already want to spend their careers treating mixed and food animals in the communities that raise them.

Built Around Mentorship, Not Just Admission

The program is not a guaranteed backdoor into vet school, and both institutions are upfront about that. Students accepted into the Georgia Rural Practice VIP still have to complete the full UGA College of Veterinary Medicine admissions process like everyone else. What the program does provide is something harder to manufacture on your own: an ABAC faculty advisor in the Animal Science track paired with a UGA veterinary faculty mentor who specializes in food-animal medicine, guiding students through coursework, prerequisites, and hands-on experiences built specifically around rural practice from day one of their undergraduate career.

Eligibility is narrow by design. Applicants must be Georgia residents who have already completed a full academic year in ABAC's Animal Science track within the Bachelor of Science in Agriculture major, and they need to show real, demonstrated interest in animal agriculture and mixed or food-animal medicine specifically, not veterinary medicine in general. The idea is to find students whose commitment to rural practice already predates the application, and then give that commitment years of structured support instead of leaving it to chance.

The First Two Students

The program's inaugural cohort is exactly two students, Maylee Barnes of Bartow and Lainey Kate Harris of Folkston, and their stories read like a case study in why this pipeline needed to exist in the first place. Harris traces her interest in animal care back to a childhood emergency involving her family's pot-bellied pig, Rosie, who was injured by a neighbor's dog. With no vet readily available, her grandfather's solution was to put burnt motor oil on the wound to fight infection. It worked well enough at the time, but it left Harris wanting something better than folk remedies the next time an animal on her family's land got hurt.

Barnes came to animal agriculture a different way, moving from Florida to her family's Georgia farm during the pandemic and discovering a passion for animal care that only deepened after three years working at a veterinary practice. Between them, Barnes and Harris represent exactly the profile this program is designed to find and keep, students already embedded in agricultural life who simply needed a clearer road from the farm to the clinic.

Loan Repayment Waiting at the Finish Line

The partnership does not stop at graduation. Veterinarians who complete the Georgia Rural Practice VIP will be eligible to apply for the Georgia Veterinary Education Loan Repayment Program, giving new food-animal and mixed-animal practitioners a financial incentive to actually take a job in the rural communities the program was built to serve. Given how heavily student debt shapes where new veterinary graduates end up practicing, pairing a mentorship pipeline with loan repayment eligibility addresses both ends of the pipeline problem at once, getting students in the door and then making it financially sustainable for them to stay in rural practice once they are out.

ABAC President Dr. Tracy Brundage framed the program's real measure of success as generational rather than immediate, tying it to the students who ultimately choose to answer the call to rural practice and the agricultural communities they end up supporting. UGA VetMed Dean Dr. Lisa K. Nolan pointed to the same long view, describing the collaboration as a way to build a sustainable source of veterinarians for Georgia's rural regions for years to come, rather than a one-time fix for a single graduating class.

The MOU runs through June 2031, renewable by mutual agreement, which gives both institutions room to see whether this model actually moves the needle on a shortage that has been trending in the wrong direction for years. For now, it starts with two students, a pig named Rosie, and a bet that the best way to grow more food-animal veterinarians is to start looking for them right where the animals already are.

Source: Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College and University of Georgia College of Veterinary Medicine joint announcement, Sept. 2, 2026.